


A face in its own right

by breathedout



Series: Tumblr Prompts [4]
Category: Agent Carter (TV), Historical RPF, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Cold War, Divorce, F/M, Implied domestic violence in a side relationship, Minor Character Death, Not Romance, Peggy Carter reflects alone in a room, Reading the news, endings and beginnings, specifically her suddenly much shittier office
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-04
Updated: 2018-09-04
Packaged: 2019-06-22 15:47:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15585285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathedout/pseuds/breathedout
Summary: August 4, 1963. On a quiet Sunday, Peggy Carter moves into her new office, reads the news, and does some paperwork.





	A face in its own right

**Author's Note:**

  * For [inv3rtebrate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inv3rtebrate/gifts).



> For a prompt on Tumblr from inv3rtebrate: '"ink" or "polaroid", anything atomic age related, in Agent Carter or MCU or real life history.' I think this is actually a little of everything mentioned; hope you enjoy. :-)
> 
> Thanks, as always, to [greywash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash) for the beta read, and for the observations over dinner one night that kicked off my thinking about this prompt.

Down on the third floor, of a Sunday, the street noise was less muffled than Peggy was used to; but inside the office was so much quieter. Both hands occupied with her banker box and the precarious stack balanced atop it, she kicked a foot up to the door handle and depressed it with her heel. The bang! of the door against the inside wall cracked in the empty space. Its opening disturbed a mug on the desk nearest, which toppled and cracked but did not echo: dark-grey panels lined the walls. Peggy eyed them. With her foot she caught the door on the rebound, moving through it box-first. 

In the little den of the typing pool, silent machines at unwieldy desks slumbered under drab nylon covers, punctuated by a few bright little cardigans left hanging over the backs of chairs. Even empty the place had the feeling of gossip. Peggy thought of barracks, of boarding-houses. For a moment she stopped; rested her box on the edge of a desk with a teal-and-brown floral pen-holder and a seaside polaroid of three young women picnicking on a tartan blanket with a Golden Retriever. Peggy traced the edge of the frame with a fingernail. When she thought of women together, sharing picnics or coastal drives, she always thought of school, and of those first boarding-house years after the War; as if the 30s and 40s had been intrinsically more communal, more female; a time of fellowship. But maybe, she thought—looking down at two of the girls smiling up at the camera while the third, behind their backs, snuck the dog a bite of her sandwich—maybe it was less that that times had changed, and more that Peggy had gotten older. 

She shifted her box. An ashtray slithered out of the pile and bounced on the carpeted floor and she thought: Christ, yes, a cigarette. But first, to put this mess where it goes. She retrieved the ashtray, sandwiched the tottering pile awkwardly between her elbows, and lifted the box again; then trundled down the hall, shouldered open her office door, and released the box onto the desk with a loud _flump_. The ashtray rolled out again across the desktop. Slithering in its wake came two newspapers, a magazine, and a large manila envelope. Peggy retrieved the newspapers; stacked them next to the box, with the magazine on top. She took a breath. Picked up the envelope. Slid it under the stack of papers. Three more papers went on top of the magazine, and the ashtray next to them: convenient to hand. 

That cleared off the top of the box, which Peggy removed and leaned against the side of her desk. From inside it, she gazed up at herself in black and white: Peggy in slacks and a ski sweater in Tahoe in '50, half-smiling at Adam behind the camera with her arm around toddler Michael: _Look at Daddy, sweetheart, look at the camera_ as he reached for his tin baby cup, looking in no such direction. She took out the photograph; stood it next to her new desk lamp. And the second shot, the trip to London in '59: Peggy and Debbie in new dresses and Michael in his sharp new suit. She'd still looked so young, she thought. It was only four years ago but she looked, to herself, young and—and brittle. Breakable. Odd. She remembered—she'd _thought_ she remembered—just how she'd felt, deplaning at Heathrow, her mother waving to them from the tarmac. She wouldn't have thought she'd felt brittle. She'd thought she felt as if she'd been granted a reprieve. As if, for a moment, she could breathe. 

She inhaled now, deeply, settling the second photograph next to the first, and she sneezed. And sneezed again. And rooted through her purse while sneezing again, good grief, cigarettes, compact, lipstick, sneezing _again_ , before finally locating her handkerchief and blowing her nose, loud and wet and prolonged. 

"Bloody hell," she said, out loud. Getting her breath. The words, like all the previous sounds, were softened, absorbed, by the textured panelling that lined the walls of the little room. 

And it _was_ small. It was half the size of her old office on the fifteenth floor. Or, better said: half the size of the office she had been using, which she had commandeered for the better part of a decade while her SHIELD colleagues had hemmed and hawed, _Your service during the War, of course_ , and _couldn't be where we are today without your contributions_ , but also _in your new circumstances_ after Michael was born and _we hardly think it appropriate_ though she'd gone to Seoul pregnant with Debbie in 1950, and then, when it became apparent that she would not be retiring, _hardly necessary for a girl so often in the field_ though all of the male field operatives had offices and _your particular... directness, bearing in mind the complexities of the new world order_. But nothing ever seemed to come of it, so Peggy had just gone about the business of her work, in the office she had taken, and let them bluster. 

Fittingly enough, the thing that had finally shunted her downstairs had not been an actual decision on anyone's part, but a bureaucratic shuffle. And not even her own agency's bureaucratic shuffle; the bloody CIA's bureaucratic shuffle: which certainly hadn't targeted Peggy herself, but which had nonetheless landed her here via a chain of events falling—ironically—like dominoes: the long-time CIA sublet of SHIELD space for one of their New York field offices, the creation back in February of their Domestic Operations Division, the resulting need for more space. Specifically, as it turned out: Peggy's space, which had officially been going unused. She sneezed again. Dust rose from the desktop into the light from the single, smallish window. It looked out on the dumpster of the deli across the street. Nonetheless, she thought. This time, "Carter" actually was on the name-plate outside. Rosy memories of female togetherness aside, field agent or no field agent, CIA restructure or no CIA restructure, grimly she had fought for her own space and grimly she would cling to that plaque and to that closing door. 

And to this desk, she thought, punching the top of it in a challenging, yet comradely, way. And to this blasted lamp, and to this box of papers. And to the light from the window, which was now _her_ window, and her light; and to these four drawers with their brass fittings, and to this filing cabinet, and to this—well. It seemed she had no chair, at the moment, to which she might cling. She felt herself deflate, slightly. She'd have to make another trip to bring her old one down. For now, though, she tromped back out to the typing pool, and wheeled Miss Golden Retriever's chair back behind her new desk; and then, harrumphing a bit, sat in it, and kicked off her shoes. 

And breathed in. Peggy, and her box, and her new office, and her back reading, and her stocking feet, and someone else's chair. And breathed out.

It really was very quiet. The rustle of her cigarette packet. The flick of her lighter. A muffled car-horn from the street below. Her smoke rose, in the shaft of afternoon light; and she ashed in the tray now sitting next to the pile of papers which still awaited her. Silent, and heavy. 

She felt at once—hollowed out, then. She supposed she shouldn't have sat. The quiet and the stillness enveloped her; and at once she could feel all the places in her body that, all day, had taken the brunt of hurrying, standing, reaching for things, shoving things open and kicking them closed, hearing and speaking: the rubbed-tender places in her heels and arches where her pumps had dug in; her calves tight from the stairs; all the near-bruised echoes along her hips and her elbows that had punched elevator buttons and jimmied open doors; her arms aching from the banker box and its precarious hat. And now this: stillness. Like sinking into something deep, and cool. Peggy had forgotten…

Maybe that's what she had felt. Or had thought she was about to feel. She closed her eyes, leaning back in her borrowed chair, remembering: getting off the plane in London, four years ago: another life. She'd had three weeks ahead of her: her mother falling all over herself to pamper Debbie and most particularly Michael; and Peggy with no SHIELD, no CIA, no MI5. No Adam. No house. She'd fought every one of those prospects until practically the moment she'd got on the plane. She couldn't leave, she'd said. She had too many projects in progress; she couldn't take a week; she couldn't take a _weekend_. But her father had had a stroke: only a small one, he'd recovered, but they weren't getting any younger, her mother said, with a waver to her voice, and their only grandchildren, whom they'd scarcely met—. And so Peggy had agreed, grudgingly, feeling all the while she was being dragged away from the place she had shouldered her way into and built for herself, to fit herself. Like it would close up around her absence, as soon as she stepped away. Like she would come back, and it would be as if she'd never existed. 

And then she and Adam had just—oh, they'd fought, _really_ fought, claws out in the way that even later, even at their worst, they'd made a point of never doing. That night, though. They'd forgotten to leave the house, forgotten to take their customary drive and forgotten to keep their voices down. And so the children had no doubt heard it all: Adam laughing, incredulous, saying he couldn't leave his job to gallivant off to England; and Peggy saying she didn't know why not when she was leaving hers; and Adam saying it was different for her, she could leave any time, for good; and Peggy saying _Pardon?_ her voice climbing up the class ladder, out of her own control, _Pardon me?_ ; and Adam bullish and red-faced saying it was different for her, she had the kids; and Peggy saying, He _didn't_ have the children? Were they not his children as well as hers? and that in any case all of this was rich, _rich_ coming from him as he would be leaving a middle-tier buyer position in Macy's Layette division, a job he happened into by chance, because it happened to come vacant, whereas she would be leaving—she would be be leaving her _life's work_ ; and Adam saying he knew she looked down on him, he knew she'd rather be with any of those slick goddamn guys she worked with; and Peggy laughing a shrill, horrible laugh, her voice unrecognisable: Jealousy? Sexual jealousy, that's what you, that's what you think, not—not the administration of empire and democracy but bloody—shagging my colleagues at the Christmas party?; and Adam saying Macy's had Christmas parties too, he hoped she realised that, saying he'd had plenty of offers, saying she was nothing but—oh. Well. They'd both said more than enough. 

They'd made it up, of course. The very next night. One brittle, strung-tight morning of avoiding the slightest touch to each other over breakfast, and one family dinner thick with bruised exhaustion, and they'd both been painfully sincere in their apologies; painfully ready to comfort one another; to take it back. And if there was still something, a certain stiltedness, a reserve… She still remembered wishing, as she got on the plane, that they could be together, the four of them. That Adam could be there to hold Peggy and hold her back; to take Peggy's side when her mother started in on her; to continue polite dinner conversation with Peggy's parents when Peggy was called away to see to Debbie or Michael; to cover over her family's wounds and its disappointed expectations with the novelty of his gauchely ingratiating Americanness. Christ, she expected to _miss_ him and she did but she also—

She opened her eyes; looked down at the little black-and-white image: the three of them four years previous, perched on her mother's sofa in front of her mother's louvred sitting-room doors. Peggy's fixed smile. The careful way she leaned into her daughter, as if reassuring herself of the girl's presence. In hindsight, she remembered that trip as an unexpected pleasure: a relief. A moment of rest. But then, maybe the very relief of it had been… unnerving. Unwanted. In motion, one can always extrapolate from what is currently happening, what might happen next. But anything could come out of stillness, couldn't it. Anything at all. 

Peggy shook herself. She lit another cigarette, and opened the top newspaper. What with the office move, and Debbie's early-training swim meet on Friday, and Peggy's dinner with the French SHIELD liaison on possible, privately-offered incentives in the ongoing nonaggression negotiations, and the men coming in to lay carpet in the new flat, she was two days behind on the news. The publicly-available news, anyway. The _New York Times_ was reporting on the halted arms shipments to South Africa and on the likely death of the nonaggression treaty, which it blamed on France and West Germany. The London papers headlined the worsening medical condition of osteopath and convicted grifter Stephen Ward and also the likely death of the nonaggression treaty, which they blamed on France and the US. In the Los Angeles papers she read about the sabotage of an Uruguayan passenger train, killing twenty. Peggy had her suspicions about the responsible parties, there—and her thoughts branched off into, on the one hand, a proposal for surveillance technology she wanted to make to Howard Stark when she saw him in September, and on the other, the necessary coordination with Brenda down the street to pick Michael up from the station when he returned from camp; all the while reading about Kennedy's appropriation of $250,000 in emergency funds to for an immediate attack on the dropout problem in the nation's major cities before schools open in the fall. (Debbie's new uniforms, Peggy thought. She kept meaning to write a cheque.) She had picked up a copy of the _New Yorker_ because it contained a profile of Alex Quaison-Sackey, ambassador from Ghana, whom Peggy had met the previous year at a fundraising dinner, and who had inspired in her a confused mixture of nostalgia (he was educated at Exeter College) and uneasiness (he spoke harshly of the Anglicisation of Ghanian culture). She read the report of his new book, and of his moustache, and of his childhood in Winneba, and the fittings of his diplomatic suite at the Sheraton-East; and of the suppression of African languages in the service of demonstrating civilization, so-called; and she was impressed by him afresh while at the same time thinking, inescapably, how at the dinner where they had met it had been his meticulous pinstriped suit which had disarmed her, and his familiar Oxford drawl, and that they had laughed while trading stories of English boarding-schools before she had thought to inquire about anything else. And she thought then, too, in a less discomfited way, of Michael, off to his first year of boarding school this fall, and of all the other girls at St. Martin-in-the-Fields when Peggy had been there: Susan and Maryam and Olivia (there had been one or two from Africa; any from Ghana? Peggy had never asked), and the way they had giggled over supper and feuded with each other and sobbed to one another over the cruelty of their peers. She was turning the pages, still, Quaison-Sackey’s profile long behind her and replaced by the New York gossip and then by the poetry section (“I live here. Twice on Sunday”), and she was thinking of those girls and then, as she had earlier, of the boarding-houses of the 40s, women all crowded together, watching each other, learning from each other, insufferable and caring, Carol with her ingeniously-sewn inventions and Doris with her men and Angie with her blonde curls and her dimples and her liberally-bestowed pet names (“How I would like to believe in tenderness”) and Peggy had never decided, had she, she’d never thought to herself: I shan’t have this anymore, or: I shall now give this up (“I have fallen a long way”), and yet, somehow, that is what she had done. She shifted in her borrowed chair and wondered if its owner would think of this before she made her own choice—or if she would find herself thinking back on the 60s, as Peggy thought back on the 40s, as a more female time, a time of other women (“She is bald and wild”); would consider it from the vantage point of the 70s or 80s, from the other side of her own decisions, as something that she had, almost inexplicably, lost. Or maybe, Peggy thought, for girls these days—

Just there, at the bottom of the page. A line and a half. "The author, who died earlier this year at the age of 30, was educated at Smith College and Cambridge University. She was a poet with a clear, original, and a very effective style, and has also written a novel."

She had met her, Peggy thought. She had _met_ her; and then looked down, reflexively, at the older of the two snaps: little Michael with his baby cup. When it was taken, Peggy had been twenty-nine. 

And so Peggy must have been older in that picture, sitting on that davenport in her slacks and ski sweater, than that intense young blonde—coiffed bangs, painfully slender figure—had been when they were introduced at Magda's cocktail party in… when? '59, Peggy thought. Yes. '59. For it had been the same year, now that she thought of it, of that ominously comforting trip to England. She and the children had spent the better part of August abroad, and returned in time for Michael to start fifth grade, it must have been, and Debbie to start third; and that was the autumn when Peggy had been so busy averting that business with the Krushchev visit and the threatened double assassination, and then—and then there had been this party. One of Magda's cocktail 'dos, in her Fifth Avenue apartment, timed to coincide with the gala two blocks down celebrating the opening of the new Guggenheim. She remembered craning for a look as their cab passed, and making some remark about the cylindrical white storeys, widening out from the bottom toward the top, and Adam had leaned over to see out her window, laughing into her hair, his voice deep as it got when he was playful and pleased, saying _We should do this, get out like this_ and Peggy had said _Not just when a wedding cake opens, you mean?_ and her chest had—eased, for a moment, riding along Fifth Avenue with the wet pavement slick with orange-brown leaves and Adam rubbing her shoulder; and then there had been this woman. 

Peggy could hardly remember—they'd struck up a conversation by the devilled eggs, hadn't they. Magda had been there, and she'd introduced them, _Mrs. Hughes_ , Magda had said, and then said they'd have a lot to talk about: _Ted and Sylvia have just been upstate—doesn't Adam's family have a place on the lake in Saratoga?_ And then Magda, being Magda, had swanned away before Peggy was even done agreeing that yes, indeed they did. And so the two women had compared notes on Saratoga Springs—Peggy and this Sylvia, as they had stood mirroring each other, cigarettes in their right hands and drinks in their left. Peggy remembered, of course, that she had had a glass of claret, mostly full; she couldn't recall what Sylvia had been drinking. Well, it was four years ago, now. Sylvia had been, apparently, twenty-six; or possibly twenty-seven. 

Sylvia's Saratoga Springs had not been the same place as Peggy's Saratoga Springs. That had become clear right away, Peggy remembered: because Adam's family lakehouse, actually closer to Malta than Saratoga, was a cramped, boaty place with a single launch from a private beach passed down through Benson family hands for four generations; whereas Ted and Sylvia had spent the last six weeks in a sprawling historic mansion on a 400-acre estate right next to the race course, complete with professionally-tended gardens, a full complement of artist colleagues, and three catered meals a day—all made possible by foundation funding. _Oh yes_ , Sylvia had said, after ten minutes or so of back-and-forth. _It's been so helpful. I'm learning—everyone has their, their oddities, don't they? Their buried weirdnesses. I'm learning to write from mine._

It had been as if her whole self had kindled from within, when she'd said it. Peggy thought she'd have probably forgotten the exchange by now, if it hadn't been for the way Sylvia's face had transformed. And Peggy, who had never had time for poetry or even novels—had never seen the point, particularly, when the real-life events of the world were difficult enough to keep on top of from day to day—had suddenly felt a strange investment. "Yes, we do," she had told her. "We certainly do." She had wanted to make a note, to seek out the results of this feverish young woman's sojourn at the estate near the racecourse, coming to terms with her own selfness. And so she had asked her what to look out for, where the poems would be coming out, and Sylvia had smiled, exhaling smoke, and said she published under her maiden name; which Peggy had been been writing down when a man's voice had said "Darling," approaching from Peggy's ten o'clock, "here you are," and Peggy had looked up just in time to see Sylvia's flinch. Her shutting-down. His hand on her arm.

It had never got that bad with Adam, anyway. Peggy couldn't stand to think of—they were decent to each other, weren't they? More or less. Even now.

She looked down at the little notice. Ringed on all sides by the red of her nail-lacquer: _Cambridge University… A poet with a clear… very effective …_. Peggy and Sylvia hadn't spoken about Cambridge, Peggy didn't think. They hadn't swapped boarding-school stories as she'd done with Mr. Quaison-Sackey, though Sylvia presumably had had them. Indeed, before that mention of Sylvia's "weirdnesses" they had only traded the kind of cocktail-party banter generally required of two wives, in bright dresses, in a Fifth Avenue apartment, who had both happened to spend time in Saratoga Springs. Perhaps that was the reason Peggy still thought of her that way, despite having only made her most glancing acquaintance: "Sylvia." Not "Mrs. Hughes," as Magda had introduced her; not "Mrs. Plath," as she showed on the page; not by surname alone; but as "Sylvia" simply: just as she thought of herself that night, standing with her claret in her hand, not as Agent Carter or Mrs. Adam Benson but simply as "Peggy." There had been, she supposed, no particular need to establish a rapport. For they had spoken the same language from the beginning—or anyway, something that stood in for a language. Something which banished quiet, and passed time, and fixed them comfortably in relation to one another, and which was only shown up as something less, perhaps, than it could be, when Sylvia had said what she did. 

And then that flinch. And Peggy… Adam, in the cab home, beside himself, had said that she barged in and made a mess of things that were none of her business. _Always_ , he had said. A bull in a china shop, her. _Never stop to think_ , he had told her, _you might not know the meaning behind every little thing, might not know what's best for every other goddamn person you meet, Christ, it was nothing, it was probably nothing, all couples argue, now look at you_. And Peggy sitting there with her jaw clenched and the front of her cocktail dress still drenched and salt-stained and faintly pink, thinking of the way they'd laughed in the cab on the way to the party, pointing out the window at the Guggenheim. Thinking: _All couples argue. That's all this is._

Now she sat back in a stranger's office chair, shoeless; and lit another cigarette. There was a scuff in the paint by the door, where her elbow had made contact with the wall as she'd tried to keep everything balanced atop her banker box. There was probably another one like it by the main entrance. There was no doubt evidence that she'd kicked open the door. Peggy Carter Benson: blunt instrument. Adam hadn't been wrong.

But then or now, she couldn't say: I'll be different. Or: I don't regret it, but I'd do it differently now. Or: faced with a threat I'll act in haste and violence for the preservation of Kennedy or Kruschev but put me back in that living room, that October, speaking that language which wasn't quite a language, writing down that name, watching that shoulder-shrug, and I won't draw conclusions, won't act on instinct, won't spill red wine down the front of my dress so that Sylvia will step forward, like any wife in any Fifth Avenue apartment, so that I can say to her, to begin with, _Oh damn—will you—can you hold this, I'm so sorry—salt, can you come with me to the kitchen—_ which might have worked, might have bought them a few minutes alone (though Sylvia with a glance behind her had said _Oh—I don't know—_ ), might have sufficed for some kind of intervention if Magda had not come up just at that moment to spirit Peggy away, keeping her half an hour in the master bathroom while they dabbed salt and soda water on her dress. In similar circumstances today, Peggy couldn't honestly claim she wouldn't do the same thing: even though, when they'd emerged from the bathroom, dress unsalvageable, Ted and Sylvia had gone.

 _We all have our little oddities_ , Sylvia had said. Peggy had said, _We certainly do_. Peggy supposed, looking down at the magazine page, that the oddities Sylvia had been talking about were probably not all that little, either. 

Peggy sighed. She put the magazine aside. The shaft of sunlight through the little window had lengthened, and narrowed; and had now been choked off by shadows of the surrounding buildings. She should go soon. Be back for Debbie, when she got back from her trip with Nancy to the arcade. She reached under the _Chronicle_ and the _Globe_ and drew out the manila envelope; then pulled the papers from it with a soft susurrus. _The Court having in this cause by a decree nisi_ , she read, and _divorced from the bonds of matrimony by reason of agreed-upon separation bearing date and entered on the 31st day of July A.D. nineteen hundred and sixty-two_ , and _petition that said decree nisi be made absolute and that a final and absolute decree be entered_. Outside, on the street, the half-twilight of late summer afternoon in the city settled down amongst the passers-by. The crying of street vendors. The barking of a dog, far off. _Margaret Carter Benson_ , Peggy signed, again and again, until she ran out of sheets; and then she slid them all back in their envelope, and the envelope into her bag. She put her feet back in her shoes, and her young colleague's office chair back where it went; and then gathered up her things and shut the door to her new office, and locked it, and walked outside.

**Author's Note:**

>   1. All cited news stories are actually from _The New York Times_ , August 2-4, 1963. Thank you, NYT, for having searchable archives.
>   2. All quoted lines of poetry, as well as the title, are from Sylvia Plath's "The Moon and the Yew Tree," which appeared in the August 3, 1963 issue of _The New Yorker_. The profile of Alex Quaison-Sackey also appeared in this issue, and is as described. His book is entitled _Africa Unbound: Reflections of an African Statesman_.
>   3. Plath and Hughes did spend time at Yaddo writer's colony in 1959, where she worked on the poems that would become her first collection, _The Colossus_. 
>   4. There was a striking lack of contemporary obituaries for Plath, considering that at the time of her death she was a famous poet who was also famous for being the pretty American wife of another famous poet. [Here](https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/02/there-are-almost-no-obituaries-for-sylvia-plath/273032/) is an _Atlantic_ article that goes into greater depth about this (content warning for suicide, possibly obviously). The short author bio included in this story is quoted in that article, but it's actually from _Punch_. The August 1963 _New Yorker_ double-page spread of Plath poetry does not, in reality, include an author bio.
>   5. Anyway, the lack of obits obscured the original seed for this story, which is that Plath's death and the announcement of the CIA's Domestic Operations Division actually happened on the same day: February 11, 1963.
> 



End file.
